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Remember the old joke about The Golden Rule? "He who has the gold, rules."
Plutocracy is rule by the wealthy. Even though western democracy is well established at this point, those with "the gold"—wealthy individuals and corporations—are having greater and greater influence over our laws and regulations.
The United States is a democracy—or more exactly, a democratic republic—which means that we elect representatives who are supposed to follow the will of the people. Unfortunately, due to the influence of big money in politics, the "we" part of "we the people" is increasingly dominated by the richest individuals and corporations. This has serious implications for the long term health of our system of governance, but it also has implications for our personal health and the land, air, and water around us.
Global corporations are increasingly abandoning their long-established, well trained, well paid work forces in the US and other industrialized countries and transferring jobs to cheaper overseas labor pools. Lower labor costs mean more profits for the corporations, higher share prices for the stockholders, and bigger bonuses for the millionaire executives.
A couple of decades ago, overseas outsourcing affected mostly manufacturing jobs; today, technical and administrative jobs are also up for outsourcing. The overall effect is a lowering of
average income levels for everyone except those few people at the top.
Proponents of free trade argue that the loss of home-based jobs is temporary, and as people get retrained, the net effect is a positive one because the global economy becomes more efficient. But with technology-sector jobs being lost and today's replacement jobs tending to be lower-paying service jobs, this old maxim no longer holds true. Millions of US jobs have been lost in the last few years, and the replacement jobs pay anywhere from $9,000 to $15,000 less in annual salary, according to various estimates.
The effect that this can have on the average schmo's standard of living is obvious enough, but since family income level is one factor in predicting health, Mr. and Mrs. Schmo's falling income levels will ultimately affect their family's physical well being too.
The US government enables the outsourcing of jobs by pursuing global trade agreements that allow corporate interests to trump national interests, fair-labor requirements, health and safety standards, and environmental laws. Jobs then naturally flow to countries with the lowest standards—i.e. to the countries with the lowest barriers to maximum corporate profits.
The news is full of stories about Mad Cow disease in beef; PCBs in farmed salmon; genetically modified organisms contaminating the seeds from which our conventional crops are grown; mercury in tuna and other fish; pesticides on fresh fruits and vegetables and in processed foods. These and many other food-related problems have crept up on us over time because of lax laws and poor regulatory enforcement.
No politician would ever admit that they write laws or regulations intentionally designed to benefit particular industries—and sometimes even particular corporations or individuals—but the fact that they do so is just about the worst-kept secret in Washington and our state capitols. The benefits that are doled out often come at our expense in the form of more pollution and less-safe products.
For instance, regulations to fully protect the food supply from Mad Cow Disease have been in place in Europe for a decade. Similar laws in the US have been much less stringent due to strong resistance from the beef industry.
Here's another example: Our waters—and, hence, fish—have become contaminated with mercury because we have failed to insist that power plants and other industrial sources of mercury clean up their act to the greatest extent possible. In 2004, at the same time part of US the government was issuing safety warnings on mercury contamination in fish, other parts of the government were working hard to avoid implementing the strongest possible mercury-pollution controls on power plants because the industry doesn't want them.
Without getting bogged down in whether the wars in Iraq and our policies in the Middle East are about oil, it is safe to say that oil is a big consideration in our foreign policy decisions. To the extent that those decisions incite terrorists, we are exposed to dangers that might not exist if different policies were in place. The fact that the terrorists choose an inappropriate way to protest our policies does not change the fact that they do protest violently and that it causes death and destruction. Of course, we should not let our foreign policy decisions be held hostage to the philosophies of terrorists, but neither should we let foreign policy decisions be held hostage to a continuing need for imported oil.
Politicians do a lot of jaw-boning about ending our addiction to foreign oil, but the only truly workable way to do this in the long run is to reduce the amount of oil we use, and the best way to do that is by improving the fuel economy of the US vehicle fleet. But oil companies and automakers both resist improvements in fuel efficiency, and in the last decade, most politicians have fallen in line with those corporate desires. Don't forget that these are some of the same special interests who resisted mandatory seat belts in the 1960s, implementation of the original Clean Air Act of 1970, and the
fuel economy standards of the 1970s. Campaign contributions did not stop politicians from smartly passing those laws then, and they should not stop our representatives from passing updated laws now.
One other great example of how plutocracy affects our physical safety relates to chemical plants in the US. After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, there was much concern that US chemical plants would become terrorist targets. An explosion at any given chemical plant could be very serious and might affect hundreds of thousands of people in surrounding neighborhoods. In response, the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works sent to the Senate floor a draft law toughening security requirements at chemical plants and requiring companies to seek out new techniques that would use less toxic chemicals. The committee vote on the bill was 19-0—a strong show of bipartisan support. Unfortunately, industry groups got wind of the legislation, twisted the arms of the Senate leadership, and the bill magically never came up for a vote in the full body of the Senate.
Let's be clear: Grinning Planet is all for capitalism. We're big fans of Groucho Marx but not so much of Karl Marx, and we do not advocate centralized government control of the means of production. However, unrestrained capitalism has little conscience or ethical compass other than the bottom line. We are also not opposed to the accumulation of wealth, but we are against the use of that wealth and its inherent power to "rig the system" to ensure additional wealth.
Governments control the rules of the game. In theory, we the people control the government. But these days, big money talks, and the rest of us walk.
What can you do about it? Support politicians who:
- support better corporate governance;
- work for fair labor practices;
- advocate fair trade (which is different than free trade) that includes consistent environmental and labor standards;
- work to eliminate subsidies and tax loopholes exploited by wealthy individuals and corporations;
- support campaign finance reform and public financing of elections.
Remember, this is not about class warfare, it's about keeping the system fair so things don't get so out of whack that one day we end up with REAL class warfare.
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